The invention relates to a method for communicating with an application on a portable data carrier and such a portable data carrier.
Portable data carriers, in particular in the form of chip cards or smart cards are employed in a multiplicity of applications today, such as e.g. in mobile telephones as SIM or USIM cards, as bank cards, health cards and the like. Such portable data carriers, for executing corresponding applications, comprise a microprocessor and a plurality of volatile and/or non-volatile memory areas. As a non-volatile memory area e.g. a ROM or EEPROM or a flash memory can be provided. The volatile memory is realized for example as a RAM. In contrast to the non-volatile memory area, data from the volatile memory area are lost when the execution of a process on the data carrier is concluded (card reset) and/or the current supply required for executing processes is cut off.
For the production of platform-independent applications for a portable data carrier particularly object-oriented programming languages are suitable. Here, the Java Card™ technology has taken hold. This technology is described in the Java Card specification that is continually updated and is present in the version 3.0. In the Java Card specification the Java Card virtual machine (JCVM) and the Java Card API (API=application programming interface) are defined, which form the Java Card runtime environment (also referred to as JCRE). Within the framework of the present invention a portable chip card working on the basis of the Java Card specification is referred to as Java card.